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SAP CRM ORCL N... Oracle, SAP getting rattled by the 'Cloud'
PROVIDED BY MarketWatch - 12:01 AM 03/22/2012
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Oracle Corp. (ORCL) put out fairly upbeat report this week, but analysts covering the enterprise software giant still worry about the growing threat posed by smaller companies offering software to businesses as a Web-based service.
The trend is known as cloud software, software-as-a-service, or simply SaaS, and has been around for roughly a decade. It essentially allows businesses to pay a subscription usually based on the number of users for access to software used for such tasks as managing payroll and keeping tracking of customers, instead of paying big licensing fees for software installed on their own networks under a client-based business model.
While the cloud model has been growing over the past decade in the small and mid-sized segments of the corporate IT market, analysts say it's begun to win adherents among larger customers that used to rely solely on big vendors such as Oracle (ORCL) and SAP .
"SaaS was considered a great delivery model for the mid-market," said ThinkEquity analyst Brian Schwartz. "Those tend to be lower-priced deals. ... Now the big customers are turning to SaaS."
That shift quickened in the last three years, he added. The reason: the economic meltdown forced even the big corporations to cut back on information technology spending.
"The tipping point was the great recession," Schwartz said. "You had IT departments that had their budgets slashed. But what didn't change was the requirements to manage the IT infrastructure."
In fact, managing an IT network just got tougher with the explosion in Web traffic and in the data that big companies had to deal with. "That was the big inflection for Saas," Schwartz said.
And that inflection is reflected in the way software shares have performed. To be sure, Oracle (ORCL) and SAP have been on a roll of late. Both stocks have more than doubled since hitting their low points in March of 2009.
But shares of Salesforce.com (CRM) and NetSuite (N) have soared much higher, each jumping more than four-fold over the same period. And they're posing a bigger problem for software giants that rely heavily on contracts with large enterprises.
"The hot SaaS companies are going after Oracle (ORCL)," said Cowen analyst Peter Goldmacher in an interview.
Concern about the rising competitive threat of SaaS firms helped weigh on Oracle's (ORCL) shares on Wednesday, despite a relatively upbeat quarterly report the day before that showed an 18% rise in profits.
Goldmacher noted in a report that, while the company showed a resumption in growth of its all-important maintenance revenue line, "in light of big competitive losses to SaaS competitors in CRM and HR, we remain concerned about Oracle's (ORCL) ability to renew Apps maintenance over time."
For example, Salesforce.com (CRM) says it recently won over major Oracle (ORCL) customers, such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) , Electronic Arts (EA) , Eli Lilly (LLY) and Xerox (XRX) . The company said it has also scored customer wins against SAP, including deals with Dolby (DLB) and Fujitsu.
Oracle (ORCL) and SAP have tried to fight back. One way has been to gobble up SaaS companies, a buying spree that seems to have picked up over the past five months. Oracle (ORCL) recently signed deals to buy RightNow , which offers customer relations applications, and Taleo (TLEO) , which helps business recruit and keep track of job applicants. SAP has bought SuccessFactors , another human resources application firm.
Goldmacher argues that these moves are "primarily defensive" and are essentially a way of "trying to get the message out that they have SaaS too."
But so far, he added, the message "rings hollow." One reason is that the traditional software companies like Oracle (ORCL) and SAP face serious hurdles. One of them is rooted in the lingering uncertainty in the economy. ThinkEquity's Schwartz says that has led to corporate customers having a "low tolerance for a long payback period."
"Back in the olden days, Oracle (ORCL) or SAP could go to a customer and basically show them that they're going to get massive ROI [return on investment] from deploying their solution," he said. "You may not get the ROI for three, four, five years from now -- but you're going to get it. There's just no tolerance for that anymore."
With software-as-a-service firms, a customer has more flexibility and in many cases, they can see an return on their investment faster. Then there's also the cultural factor, especially when it comes to sales operations, Schwartz said.
Sales people for Oracle (ORCL) or SAP typically get paid a huge commission from landing long-term contracts, and they can usually make large sums of money with one or two deals in a year, Schwartz said.
"What you do is you're hunting for the big elephant, the big deal," he said. "You land the big deal and then you're off to hunt the next big deal. You got a customer locked in."
One the other hand, salespeople for SaaS companies like Salesforce.com (CRM) must go for volume. And because customers can more easily shift to other vendors, they must also work harder to maintain those relationships.
"To be a SaaS company, you have to be born to serve your customer," Schwartz said. "Customer service is just crucial. You need to maintain rates."
John Wookey, executive vice president for Salesforce.com's (CRM) social applications, echoed this point, saying, "Every year, you want [customers] to say, 'I like using it.'"
Wookey also used hunting to illustrate the difference, saying that with software-as-a-service, "You move from a hunter mentality to a farming mentality. There's still hunting involved, but you are building long relationships."
Still, there are areas in which Oracle (ORCL) and SAP are seen having an advantage against the smaller software-as-a-service firms. Oracle (ORCL) Chief Executive Larry Ellison highlighted the issue of security as he touted the company's new cloud computing initiative on Tuesday during the company's earnings call.
"Salesforce.com (CRM) does not offer this kind of security in their cloud," he said. "This is a key advantage for us going forward."
Schwartz also cited another "wild card" that could give the big software companies a lift: the ability to process enormous amounts of data. That trend has led to the heightened interest on such areas as business intelligence and analytics software, which enables businesses to make decisions and map strategy based on rapidly increasing data traffic on their networks.
Software-as-a-service companies, he said, "are not good at data integration." Still, it's a problem they can eventually fix.
Meanwhile, Goldmacher of Cowen said, the software giants face tough choices as their core businesses come under attack from the pure play Saas players.
"The dilemma becomes: do they creatively destroy their business and go after growth opportunities," he said. "Or do they just age and fade into the background. ... I think everything has to be on the table."
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